(ERGO) – Sayid Abdullahi Hassan and his family of seven have been putting up with living in a windblown shelter for the past month, after their house among hundreds more was buried by encroaching banks of sand whipped by coastal gales across the central Somali village of Dinowda.
“Our current house is made of only sticks, pieces of iron sheet, and clothes,” Sayid told Radio Ergo.
It is the second year in a row that their house has been destroyed by the shifting sand dunes along the coastal strip in Mudug’s Jariban district.
“The long drought has worsened the situation because when rain came it used to wash the sand away from our houses,” Sayid added.
An estimated 800 families in the fishing villages of Dinowda and Kulub, further north, have been left homeless as sand submerged or destroyed their houses.
Sayid, a fisherman, has other challenges too, especially the scarcity of water, as 12 wells in the Dinowda area were buried by the sand.
“One barrel of water costs $15! We get it from water tankers coming from 50 kilometres away. Sometimes when we have money we buy a barrel and when we are short of money we can only buy a couple of jerricans of water,” he complained.
Over 300 families have put up makeshift structures just outside Dinowda, in a place where the sand dunes have not yet reached. But the winds are very strong and the flimsy structures keep being blown down forcing them to constantly rebuild every two weeks or so.
For weeks Sayid has not gone out to sea fishing because of the strong seasonal winds and turbulent waters. He is living off financial support from his relatives.
“I am ready to leave my hometown if I get financial help that would allow me to leave here,” he dejectedly told Radio Ergo’s local reporter. “I will go to a better place than this and find a job.”
With roads becoming impassable as a result of the accumulated sand, food prices in the coastal villages have gone up, as well as the cost of transport. The nearest town is Jariban, about 70 kilometres away inland, from where the villagers get their food and supplies.
“Big trucks used to bring food stocks, but they are no longer available, it is small vehicles that are now used for transportation and they have increased the fare [from Jariban] from five to eight dollars, leading to the increase in food prices,” said Abdi Yussuf Karshe, a fisherman in Kulub.
Abdi, who has two houses in Kulub, has refused to move out like many other villagers, who engage in daily battles against the sand dunes.
“When the sand gets closer to us, we take spades and move it away from our plots. We do this for three hours in the morning and another three hours in the afternoon. I have been doing this for the last three years,” Abdi said.
The deputy governor of Jariban district, Mursal Abdulle Kalaf, noted that the impact of sand movement in these areas has not only affected the people but also the livestock. The areas for pasture have become a desert over the past seven years.
“We have tried several times to plant trees but our efforts bore no fruit because there was no rain,” Mursal told Radio Ergo.
The district authority has helped 500 families from Dinowda and Kulub to move temporarily to Jariban. Most are relying on their relatives there for food, water, and shelter, whilst some have built makeshifts houses.
The deputy governor said only a concerted effort by both the local authority and the federal government could provide a lasting solution to this problem by jointly carrying out a massive planting of trees to act as a windbreak and prevent erosion. This would also entail an irrigation scheme to ensure success.